Traffic Generating Video

Heres a quick Video from YouTube on a couple of ideas for generating traffic for your blog.




I'll be trying each service out mentioned in the video over the next couple of days and reporting back as to wether I see any increase in the amount of traffic.

I already use PingOMatic.com when I have posted but look forward to seeing what other options FeedShark has. One thing that I do know I have to start doing is using tags with each post. I recently reread the html code for this and should be doing them soon.

Article Marketing: Pro's and Con's

Article Marketing is when you write an article for public consumption and submit it to the many article directories out there (such as ArticleYou) for other webmasters and bloggers to use free of charge.

The benefit to you is that when the web publishers use your article they keep your author byline intact which should include a link back to your site. Thus building backlinks from not only the sites who use your article but the article directories themselves.

Thats the good part.

The bad part is that despite submitting your article to dozens of sites it may not be included at all. And just because it is included doesn't mean someone will use it on their site.

For instance, one of my article was submitted to half a dozen sites and only showed up on one. It has had 190 views but doesn't seem to show up anywhere on the web, either linking to me or in the search engines without the link.

Maybe I'm just a bad writer. Maybe it was content people really arent interested in. The good side is that the one site where it got listed has a Page Rank of 2.

Here's my Example

Thats just one article though, if I kept up the effort of pushing out articles on a regular basis I believe that it would help my website or blog. More for SEO reasons than for the Traffic.

My other problem is the whole duplication of content. Is it better to keep an article on my site or blog until well after it is indexed in the search engines before submitting to article sites? Or is it better to write something totally original for submission to article directories?

Thats something to think about.

The Wikipedia No Follow Controversy

Wikipedia in a recent descision decided to add the nofollow tag to all outgoing links, effectivly reducing any page rank boost or backlink effects from the search engines.

Without the boost in PR some people are screaming that it is unfair to small websites trying to start out. I don't think that this is true. While a boost in Page Rank by having Wikipedia link to you is an awesome thing, you have to think about why your link is there in the first place.

Relevance to the Topic. Your link should be a resource for people looking for more information than that included in the Wikipedia description.

So what do you get out of it if the backlink doesn't count? Relevant traffic. Thats what you should be working on anyway. Simply focusing on your page rank wont improve your site as much as if you work towards creating useful and compelling content that readers want to see and link to.

Read Wikipedia Links Useless for SEO for more information.

Color Matching makes a difference with Adsense

That title couldn't be more understated.

In one of my first experiments with Adsense I converted the colors of the wide Skyscraper units on my web site Toast Guy. I made a mistake too in color matching, I used the text color for the titles instead of my intended use of the link color for the page.

First let me say that this is an old website, and it was one of the first to get Adsense added when I didn't know what I was doing. The skyscraper Ad unit had a bright orange border, a white background and tan colored text. It didn't look anything like my site.

I eliminated the border and matched the background to my site and the text to the text of my site. Like I said I screwed up on the Link/Title color but didn't notice until recently and haven't had time to change it.

Also I don't really promote this site or do much with it as I have been very busy.

Because of Googles Terms of Service in regards to revealing my CTR and other stats I can't give you specifics. (Which is sad because this is VERY exciting) I don't think it would be against their TOS to say vaguely that I saw almost a 12 fold increase in clicks.

Let me just say that you owe it to your bank account to make the color changes necessary to integrate the ad units into the theme of your page.

New Option for Domain Monetization

I never had any luck generating income from parking my domains, and lets face it developing a single site, never mind more than a dozens is a lot of work.

Thats why I was excited about the Jan. 19 launch of LeaseThis.com, check out the excellant article at Domain Name Journal for more information.

Launch of LeaseThis.com Gives Domain Owners a New Option for Domain Monetization:

"Leasing domains has also been an option but due to the intricacies of lease contract negotiations and the legwork required to match interested advertisers with domains related to their business, it has been an option that only a handful of domain owners have used. A new company, LeaseThis.com, seeks to change all of that and make leasing a primary monetization option that will be as simple to use as today’s popular domain parking programs. "

Making Money From A Blog

So much lately I have been focusing on Optimizing other web pages and not working on my blog. And what work I have done on this blog relies on Google Adsense for generating any income.

That's why its good to come across posts like the following which remind me about the importance of not putting all my eggs in the Google basket.

Making Money From A Blog - December Recap « John Chow dot Com:

"The blog is now making what most people would consider full time income. At $2,800 a month, most bloggers would be able to quit their job and concentrate on their blog full time. Keep in mind that you wouldn’t be able to do this if you just run Google AdSense. The most important lesson to keep in mind when it comes to monetizing a blog is the revenue mix. Find ad sources that will compliment each other and they’ll add to your overall income. Do not put all you advertising eggs in one basket."

John Chow’s website is an excellent example of a site geared towards making money online. While his title tag (John Chow dot Com The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul) isn’t focused for generating any specific search engine traffic he more than makes up for it in promotions.

For instance his Review My Blog promotion in which he is exchanging backlinks for a review of his blog on your site. For a new blog that’s a great help as his site has a Page Rank of 4.

You can be sure I’ll be following his advice and looking into more ways in which to add to the revenue mix on my blog. (Such as utilizing his mix of AdSense and IntelliTXT.)

So as a beginning blogger, not only am I already overwhelmed at the amount of stuff to learn and implement on my many websites and blogs, now I'll just have to go back over everything to integrate other sources of ad revenue which is compatible with Googles AdSense TOS.

YAY!

Apology for Comment Backlink Post

Right,

Looks like I somehow overlooked the websites I actually did comments for. This morning I did a quick double check and found links back to my site from many of the places where I had previously added a comment.

So it does work. Commenting on other blogs does help.

Unfortunately, because I fill my name in the name field on a comment form much of my anchor text is pointing back at "Chris". That and many pages have a Page Rank of Zero.

So the exception, the reason I re-ran the backlinks was because of Bloglinker.com. I was certain that because of their Javascript code for inserting backlinks into your site that the search engines weren't picking them up and thus the whole thing was useless. In a way it is useless because those other sites linking to me never show up. Not that my including them on my webpage or blog helps them any either.

But the saving grace is that Bloglinker has a Page Rank of 6 and by linking back to me in my profile I am indexed faster and it upped my page rank for this particular site from gray bar to 2.

Title Tags Video - SEO

Title Tags are one of the most important, and most overlooked Optimization techniques out there as far as on page optimization goes.

I have a friend who has never used them on any of the web pages he has built, "How important can they be?" he would ask never really wanting to hear what I had to say.

Your Title Tag is what is viewed first by the search engine spiders, it is what shows up as a hyperlink to your website when (or if) it shows up in a search query.

So many people make the same mistake I did when I first started out, thats if they even use the title tags at all. They include the name of their website. Great, but unless you are microsoft or dell, no one is going to be seaching for you by your company or website name. Your content should make that search possible.

The title tag in my eyes should be focused on your niche keywords and use the least amount of words possible with no duplication. Thats how you get to the top of the search results for your particular keyword.

The video below mentions the 63 character limit. If you are using anything close to that then you are saying too much.

Also what they fail to mention is title tag spam, which can get your site delisted. Thats when you enter your keyword over and over again. The fewer the words the more weight the search engines give them.

Remember, Focus Your Keywords.

SEO Link Building Video

Came across this video and thought I would throw it up here. Mostly covers what I covered in the Post yesterday about finding backlinks but its still good to see.




And I'll have some SEO and AdSense related video Tutorials of my own up soon.

Much better than this if I do say so myself.

Recip Links - Finding Yours and the Competition

Thought I would throw up a quick post since almost everyone asks me this question at some point or another.

"How do I find out who is linking to me?"

And more importantly, "How do I find out who is linking to my competition?"

Easy.

Go to your favorite search engine, in the search field enter; link:www.mywebsite.com

mywebsite being your website or the one you want to find out who is linking to.

The problem with this is that it is very time consuming, to go through websites, listing their page ranks, finding their contact information, and trying to figure out how best to get them to link back to you.

So there is this software, I have only used the trial version but am very impressed. Its called SEO Elite, available for free download at Download.com

While the trial version is limited it has still helped me focus certain webpages. I look forward to buying the full version soon.

Blog Comments Do Not Count as Recip Links

Every book out there on Designing a Money Making Website says you need Links Back to your Site.

While this is true most go on to suggest commenting on topic related blogs and their individual posts. In the begining I did this religously, no spamming as some people do, but on topic comments directly related to the posts in question.

And Months later no link backs according to the major search engines.

My comments were there, I could go and find them because these were sites I read frequently and had a desire to learn from. And yet my comments were doing nothing for my Page Rank.

So I did a search and came across this:

Yahoo! Search blog: A Defense Against Comment Spam

I'm pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search is one of several organizations in support of a technique that should help combat weblog comment spam. Others involved are: Google/Blogger, MSN Search, Six Apart (TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal), and WordPress.

By adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks, webmasters and weblog owners can tell search engines that the links are effectively untrusted.

So while I will continue to post on blogs of interest I just wont get my hopes up that it will contribute to my overall Page Rank.